Silent spectators

Fiji's neighbours and the larger international community decide not to interfere in the country's internal affairs.

P. S. SURYANARAYANA in Singapore

PREVENTIVE diplomacy by some of Fiji's neighbours conspicuously failed to avert the latest military coup against an elected government in the South Pacific state. So, when Fiji's military commander, Commodore Josaia Voreque (Frank) Bainimarama, toppled Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and announced the coup in a `real-time' televised address at dusk on December 5, the country's neighbours were expected to react in some forthright fashion.

However, what followed was no better than helpless hand-wringing by the larger international community - the same as in many other cases of military takeover across the world over time. It was as if Fiji's neighbours, notably Australia and New Zealand, had not at all tried to stave off the coup that Bainimarama was in fact threatening to carry out for weeks before he actually struck.

To recognise this failure of high-profile preventive diplomacy is not to advocate armed external intervention as the best means of averting internal military coups in any country at any time. Nor have international institutions rewarded Bainimarama for staging what is arguably his second coup. Defined in a strict sense, the unacceptable practice of coup will cover all interventions by the military in ways that might change the civilian political order, especially a legitimate authority at the helm, in any country.

Viewed in this perspective, the first, and arguably benign, coup-like intervention by Bainimarama in 2000 had gradually helped secure the release of Fiji's then elected Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, and others from the clutches of the "civilian coup leader" George Speight. More importantly, however, what happened thereafter was not the restoration of Chaudhry as Prime Minister for the remainder of his full and legitimate term in office. To this extent, Bainimarama's political-military intervention in 2000 was neither a full-scope coup, resulting in power for himself at the helm at that time, nor simply a police-like action to rescue a legitimate but beleaguered government of the day.

These internal niceties of Fiji's politics are relevant to the calculations of the powers that really matter to its long-term interest. Although Indo-Fijians constitute a big ethnic minority, at about 44 per cent of the country's 0.9-million population, India has had, over the years, very little political leverage of the cutting-edge kind. A number of factors, such as India's own often-changing priorities of power-play abroad, account for this reality. A significant reason, however, is a certain degree of gradual but effective alienation between Official India and Indo-Fijians. Even if not always spelt out categorically, India has often believed that it is not in its enlightened self-interest to try and democratise other countries.

For a variety of reasons, major Asia-Pacific powers such as China and Japan have also been, generally, looking at Fiji as a country with no great impact on their own respective and evolving national interests. This is so, despite China's marginal ethnic links to Fiji and Japan's one-time historical interests in Suva's geopolitical environment.

On a different but related plane, it is not uncharacteristic of the United States, the pre-eminent Pacific military power, to remain less than enthused about the "democratic experiment" in Fiji. In Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which many American foreign policy experts regard as a treatise on globalisation in the world's post-Cold War political order, the author has taken the line that "without America on duty, there will be no America Online". Regardless, though, of the many different aspects of globalisation, seen by these experts as an artefact of U.S. primacy, Washington has often remained, only selectively, on duty in the cause of "democracy" across the Pacific region. Not surprisingly now, Fiji has hardly mattered to Washington, deeply embroiled in its own military intervention for oil and pro-U.S. "democracy" of a selective kind in Iraq.

Washington does not group Fiji in the same category as Iraq - a piece of strategic asset for long-term U.S. interests. The U.S. has of course cut off its aid to Fiji in response to Bainimarama's latest coup. But Washington has not, as of writing, bothered to take the "lead" to try and tame him. That task has been left to Australia. Significantly, Canberra continues to act as a steadfast U.S. ally, except in regard to China's long-term importance to Australia's economic success and political stability. Yet, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, ever a "pragmatist", has stopped well short of any menacing moves against Bainimarama.

It was clear, by December 10, that Canberra did not regard Bainimarama's bloodless coup of December 5 as an event with sufficient critical mass to threaten Australia's primacy in the South Pacific region. Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer lost no time in calling upon Fijians to launch a movement of "passive resistance" against Bainimarama.

But Howard has had to fend off awkward questions from some critics at home. He was asked pointedly about his refusal to commit Australian troops on behalf of Qarase, when he actually sought such external help, and to prevent Bainimarama from mounting his step-by-step coup in the first place. Howard's response bears quoting at some length. On December 8, Howard said: "I didn't want the horror of Australian and Fijian troops firing at each other in the streets of Suva. The Fijian military is quite well trained. It is some thousands strong. This is an internal dispute, and the country was not being attacked. It was being subjected to a military coup. There have been military coups in the past [there] and we haven't sent troops."

Pressed further to explain why Fiji 2006 was different from neighbouring East Timor, where he had sent Australian troops at the time of its independence from Indonesia and also later, Howard said: "Timor [more recently] was something for which we historically had a particular link and responsibility. We had sent troops [earlier] as part of the United Nations-sanctioned intervention in 1999. So, there was [more recently] an ample precedent."

Maintaining that Australia had ab initio "never contemplated" sending troops to Fiji to defend democracy there, Howard pointed out, for the sake of argument, a logistical constraint as well. It was, he said, impossible to respond positively to Qarase's "last-minute" request for Australian troops and take on a "resistant Fijian military" on his behalf. Qarase relayed his distress call even as Bainimarama had reached the home stretch on his much-publicised slow-track towards the final push for a coup. The punch line in Howard's answer was that he would "not [be] prepared to risk the lives of Australian men and women needlessly". Not surprisingly in this context, Australia's continued participation in the ongoing U.S.-led military occupation of Iraq, as also Canberra's unabated support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)-led operations in Afghanistan, have been cited by Howard's critics as proof of his selective pro-democracy militarism abroad.

Some hard facts lie behind Howard's elaborate defence of military inaction in regard to Fiji. Central to this perception is the fact that Australia had entertained no second thoughts, in the past, about deputing one of its senior officers, Andrew Hughes, to function as Fiji's police chief. In his designated capacity as a "neutral" investigator in regard to sensitive cases, Hughes eventually found himself caught in the political crossfire between Qarase and Bainimarama. That led to Bainimarama seeing Hughes as a Qarase-partisan who, as a foreigner, had no business to dabble in Fiji's politics.

With Hughes withdrawing himself from the scene, even as Bainimarama intensified his preparations for the coup through highly publicised military exercises, it became clear that Australia had burnt a finger in Fiji. Hughes, who went on "leave", was "discreetly" evacuated from Suva by Australia, which had deployed a few of its naval vessels to rescue, if necessary, its own citizens.

Even as such pre-coup moves and counter-moves were under way, the Pacific Islands Forum, dominated by Australia and New Zealand, met to express solidarity with Fiji's elected government. Qarase claimed at that time that he would not seek military intervention by the Forum to help him stave off the potential coup. This meant that he would not ask Australia for help, although he later did so. However, the Forum was happy to announce, days before the coup, that there was no question of rushing military aid to Qarase in his then battle of wits with Bainimarama.

In the long run-up to what turned out to be a very unusual coup through a process of public countdown, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clarke arranged a meeting between Qarase and Bainimarama in Wellington. The objective was to defuse their hostilities and avert a coup. New Zealand played the "moderator" as different from a "mediator". The related reasoning flowed from the prestige of Fiji's military forces, whose personnel had often played skilled professional roles in U.N. peace-keeping operations around the world.

Unsurprisingly in that context, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, too, cautioned Bainimarama against launching a coup at home and putting at risk the peace-keeping avenues that were open to his soldiers outside Fiji.

In the end, Bainimarama decided to ignore all external pleas for prudence and went solely by what he hoped to gain in Fiji's domestic political arena. Shortly before the denouement, Qarase resorted to some "face-saving formulae" and acceded to several of Bainimarama's demands in all but name. This was seen by Qarase's critics as capitulation to Bainimarama at the behest of foreign powers, but the military man would have none of such `formulae' and decided to grab power.

Faced with such a defiance of international opinion, Australia and New Zealand quickly imposed defence-related and economic sanctions on Fiji. This was followed by the decision of the Commonwealth to suspend Fiji, and some international sporting organisations struck the South Pacific state off their lists of potential hosts for future tournaments. It was uniformly emphasised that the sanctions would begin to bite sooner than later.

In a larger perspective, though, Bainimarama's action has forced comparisons with the recent military coup in Thailand in the same Asia-Pacific region and the unhindered Army rule in Myanmar. While Thailand's new military ruler has managed to gain the benefit of the doubt at home and keep the larger international community guessing, Myanmar's junta is a category of its own as an entity that has survived for long.

Howard has indeed been asked about the comparison between Fiji and Thailand. His line is that "the antecedent event" in Thailand was that its now-deposed Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, "had withdrawn very significantly from the day-to-day running of the country" before the recent coup in Bangkok. In Howard's reckoning, the "different circumstances" of each coup cannot be ignored.

While this argument is debatable without being irrelevant, Australia has also hinted that it is prepared to endorse military means to defend democracy in other countries only under the auspices of the U.S. or the U.N. or both. It is clear that the use of foreign troops to avert or reverse military coups in sovereign countries is not an indisputable doctrine of international relations.